Unfortunately, like many people, the Mail was caught out by the judge finding her guilty of slander - before clearing her of the murder. At the sound of the word "guilty", they hit publish on a story about her appeal being rejected that includes reactions from the family and prosecutors being delighted - reactions that can't have happened as she was found NOT guilty of murder.

But she wasn't guilty ...

The Sun did it too I later discovered.

It's the Sun wot run it

Anyway, here's the story from the Mail's site:

Mail story

And some quotes:

"Amanda Knox looked stunned this evening after she dramatically lost her prison appeal against her murder conviction. ...

As Knox realized the enormity of what judge Hellman was saying she sank into her chair sobbing uncontrollably while her family and friends hugged each other in tears.

A few feet away Meredith's mother Arline, her sister Stephanie and brother Lyle, who had flown in especially for the verdict remained expressionless, staring straight ahead, glancing over just once at the distraught Knox family.

Prosecutors were delighted with the verdict and said that 'justice has been done' although they said on a 'human factor it was sad two young people would be spending years in jail'.

Following the verdict Knox and Sollecito were taken out of court escorted by prison guards and into a waiting van which took her back to her cell at Capanne jail near Perugia and him to Terni jail, 60 miles away.

Both will be put on a suicide watch for the next few days as psychological assessments are made on each of them but this is usual practice for long term prisoners."

And here they are publishing the right story a bit later.

So which is it?!?

And here are the Sun's two stories ...

The Sun's two stories

Embarrassing. (To be fair, Sky News and the Guardian also claimed she'd been found guilty - just not quite in so much detail ...!)

Tricked him!

When you share a link on Facebook, you can edit any of the text - which means you can fool your friends into clicking on something that isn't what it seems. Which will make all their other friends think they have an STD or are getting divorced or something.

Here's how.

Alex Moss and I are connected on Facebook. And we are both using the Guardian's new Facebook app.

I shared this link on Facebook. Facebook does all the work when you share a link, so it turned my link into this.

Here's how it looks by default ...

You can actually edit all this (just click the bits you want to change), so I removed the thumbnail and edited all the text, to look like this. I've always thought it weird Facebook lets you do this - as I could be sharing a link to anything and it seems wrong it lets you obfuscate this.

I changed it to encourage Alex to click it

The result - when Alex clicked on the link, the timline feature updated instantly to say "Alex Moss read STDs in England: Breakdown by region, gender and ethnicity" (see the screenshot back at the top of this post).

Depending on what articles the Guardian has, I could trick Alex into clicking an edited link and make it look like he was reading up on depression, STDs, adoption, murder, divorce, applying for a new job, or joining Soulmates.

You can click to remove the update that you've read something.

But that just proves you've got something to hide.

This isn't a problem with the Guardian app per se - it's a problem with any app that might contain content that you wouldn't want friends to think you're consuming.

EG Spotify users - click here for an example of the sort of problem you could have.

ASA: PCC is as independent as us

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has rejected my complaint about the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) advertising itself as independent.

I don't consider the PCC to be independent because it is "charged with enforcing the Code of Practice which was framed by the newspaper and periodical industry." This is a long winded way of saying that the Code is drawn up by a body that consists wholly of industry representatives.

The ASA has emailed me to say there are no grounds for formal action:

Although the PCC Code of Practice may have been produced by a committee of industry representatives, it is the PCC that make decisions, administer and enforce the Code.  Industry members would not contribute to the PCC’s decision on a complaint.   As such the claim to be “independent” is unlikely to mislead.

The same could be said for the ASA in that our Codes are written by the Committee of Advertising Practice, which comprises a number of industry members, but ultimately the ASA is independent because we solely enforce and administer the Codes.

Well, quite.

But for some reason The Sun website's own search engine won't show the apology when you search for his name ...

The Sun's apology to Chris, er Christopher, Jefferies

That's a screenshot of the apology. As you can see, he's changed from being Chris Jefferies (which is what they called him in the stories about him) to Christopher Jefferies, which doesn't exactly help.

But if you use the Sun website's own search engine to search for either Chris or Christopher Jefferies, you can't see the apology in the results.

Here's the results for a search for Chris Jefferies, organised into date order.

No apology to be seen ...

And here is the one result for a search for Christopher Jefferies.

No apology to be seen ...

No sign of the apology in either case ...

What hope is there for self-regulation if newspapers can't include in their own site's search results the apologies they have made about "false suggestions he might have killed his former tenant Joanna Yeates, acted inappropriately towards pupils in the past, invaded his tenants' privacy, was associated with a convicted paedophile and might have been involved in an unsolved murder in 1974"?

So how successful was the injunction at protecting a certain footballer? In this graph showing search volumes (up until Saturday), the red line shows recent searches for the word injunction, the blue line the footballer's name (probably should have been the other way round) and the yellow line the footballer's name plus the word affair.

Only this weekend did searches for his name outstrip the word injunction

Until the last few days, there were many more people searching for injunction than there were for his name. Each spike in searches for injunction sees a rise in searches for his name. But it's only on this Saturday (the final day in the graph) that search volumes for the name really outstrip the word injunction. Hardly anyone has been searching for his name plus the word affair until this weekend.

Until this weekend, then, the injunction seemed reasonably effective if search volumes are anything to go by (whatever those of us on Twitter thought).

Of course, anyone who did search would have found out the answer, especially if they used Google News which on Sunday night is suggesting the list of words shown in the screenshot when you search for the footballer's name (and I pointed out 6 days ago that there are 394,000 web results for the footballer's name plus Imogen Thomas). There were also lots of newpaper hints.

But the search volumes for the name were pretty low compared to those searching for the word injunction.

(I suppose you could argue this means that everyone knew - but I think it more likely that it means they didn't, otherwise they would all have been searching to find out the details).

This weekend, and publication of the footballer's face in Scotland, changed all that. So how many people are searching for his name now? Yesterday I showed that search volumes on Thursday for his name were equivalent to those for the word horoscope - these run at a steady 500,000 a month or about 17,000 a day.

Now that Google Insights is showing search volumes for Saturday it is suggesting that 25 times as many people searched for his name on Saturday as for the word horoscope - so that's about 425,000 people. I imagine the figure will be even higher for Sunday ...

Basically - everyone who wants to know, now knows. And it wasn't Twitter who leaked it - it was the fact that the injunction didn't cover Scotland that has lead to it all coming out.

Image credit.

Can you be anonymous on the internet?

Justice Eady says that the footballer that Imogen Thomas claims she had an affair with is entitled to a reasonable expectation of privacy - and suggests that she is blackmailing him.

But how much privacy has he got left after all rumours on Twitter and hints in the papers? I don't know who he is, of course. But if you search for the most commonly suggested player alongside Imogen Thomas's name, Google says that there are 394,000 web pages that contain both their names.

That's a lot of results

Type her name into one of Google's keywords tools and the page is full of top and rising searches suggesting one, and only one, footballer's name.

This chart shows what Google says people are searching for - you can see how many times I've had to black out one particular footballer's name so as not to breach the injunction.

We might not know who he is. But a lot of people are searching for one name.

Obviously none of this is as high-profile as a story in a tabloid newspaper ...

To confuse things further, the rumours of six-month affairs appear to be much worse than the three meetings that the footballer says actually happened. Although a Twitter account claiming (apparently genuinely) to be run by the wife of the Sun's news editor has suggested in a series of tweets that there is nothing in the blackmail claims.

The Sun hits back

The plot thickens ... Photo credit.

Shhh, don't tell ...

To avoid prison, I've changed or anonymised the details so you can't Google them, sorry.

1. One tabloid ran a story bemoaning how celebrity X hadn't talked about his wife much lately. That was the entire (non)story. It went on, for no reason, to compare the love of (rumoured super injuncter) celebrity X for his wife with the love of family-loving (and rumoured super injuncter) footballer Y for his wife. Underneath that: "Comments closed for legal reasons". This couldn't have been more obvious if it tried.
2. A broadsheet ran a column in which the author suggested an ideal set of companions for a meal - the names were a who's who of those with alleged super injunctions.
3. Another broadsheet has just run a story, written by the travel correspondent (OK, it wasn't the travel correspondent but it was on a par with them in terms of relevance), complaining that a certain performer hadn't done any gigs for a while and hadn't been on Twitter lately. There was no point to this story.
4. Meanwhile a tabloid suggested an actor was deserving of an award for acting after being seen bravely holding hands with his wife.
5. The News of the World just told everyone to look on Twitter, but helpfully pointed out it wasn't Gaby Logan or Alan Shearer, just so you woudn't be confused by any false rumours.
6. Meanwhile, every paper in Britain has gleefully pointed out that there is a Twitter account that has revealed who has a super injunction - before, again, helpfully pointing out exactly which of these tweets is not true.

I am amazed that the lawyers let these stories through. Although there's not much chance of people going to court for tweeting the rumours, the paper's are treading a very fine line. It's almost as if they are deliberately trying to get the facts out in the open so they can get these super injunctions overturned ...

Twitter's hardly been bound or gagged by the injunction

Actually, they're probably not.

If you look back at the Alfie Patten injunction, it transires that the court order was never sent to google news, so they weren’t bound by it: “We investigate removal requests based on court order violations once the court order (and the pages they want us to remove that allegedly infringe on the court order) have been brought to our attention,” said a Google spokesman. “To date, we have not received a court order relating to [this] case.” Same seems to be true in this latest case as anyone can find out the details with a bit of Googling.

And in the same case, the wording of the injunction was: “Who is bound: This order binds all persons and all companies (whether acting by their directors, employees or agents or in any other way) who know that the order has been made.”

So people passing the stories round on Twitter sound like they're not bound by the injunction as they've never seen it - a problem with blogs and super injunctions I've pointed out before.

Update: One lawyer quoted here by Judith Townend argues: "The Order will usually contain a penal notice which states very clearly that not only will the Respondents be in breach and potentially guilty of contempt if they reveal any details of the injunction, but so will any third party who is not a respondent in the proceedings but is aware of the injunction and then goes on to leak its details."

But in the same post a legal writer adds: "If you tell me that someone is having an affair and I publish this fact on my personal website or on Twitter, I cannot be in contempt of court if I did not know that a court order existed."

Most of the 000s of people tweeting stuff this stuff must know a super injunction exists - but they will have no understanding of what this means and no way of finding out the specifics. Finding them guilty of contempt of court would be pointless - and isn't going to happen.

With regard to the specific Twitter account that tweeted details of several alleged super injunctions, Stephens says: “The individual behind this is clearly going to be tracked, his electronic fingerprints are all over it and when he gets the knock on the door I would very strongly advise that he takes a toothbrush with him.”

Even this is true only if the culprit is an idiot. With no UK Twitter office to serve court orders on, and assuming the culprit used a hotmail account not in their real name, the sender is untraceable. Unless they're an idiot ...

If anyone should be packing his toothbrush, it's the Telegraph's consumer affairs correspondent. I'll leave you to work out why.

The biggest problem is that the lawyers involved didn't seem to think it's necessary to tell Google or Twitter that an injunction exists (and they can't tell Twitter anyway as it doesn't have a UK office ...)

This means that once the information is out, it's easy to find it by typing the relevant people's named into Google or Twitter search (with collateral damage to people named who aren't involved).

False rumours also denied on Twitter

In the John Terry superinjunction case, you could find out the details via Google real-time search just by typing his name into Google. No one had told Google of the injunction.

With the Alfie Patten injunction, Google News listed foreign news outlets that revealed the details of the case (the lawyers didn't bother sending the injunction to Google) - and various UK sites also published the info including Brand Republic and Walt Disney and (indirectly) ITV because they didn't know it existed.

And blogs routinely breach the terms of these injunctions but a catch-22 prevents them from knowing this as Fred Goodwin found.

Is there anyone who doesn't know the football and actor in the latest cases - especially when one weekend newspaper directly compared the two names for their relationships with their wives ...? If the lawyers want to keep these names secret, maybe start with learning how the internet works?

Photo credit.